An ancient group of ghoul chasers invades Showtime
in Poltergeist: The Legacy

As Poltergeist: The Legacy gets ready to take
flight this March on the Showtime cable network, executive producer Richard Lewis
has discovered that making the show is an "evolutionary process, taking me places that
I did not expect to go."

The series centers around "The Legacy", a fictional secret organization that took root
centuries ago as a radical extension of Socratic empiricism – one of modern man's first
attempts at quantifying and categorizing phenomena in scientific rather than religious
terms. Academic research aside, the Legacy spends its time investigating and battling
paranormal occurrences across the globe. Operating under the guise of a philanthropic
organization known as the Luna Foundation  devoted, blandly, to "the betterment of
the human condition"  the Legacy uses its near-limitless financial and political clout in
its struggle against the dark forces of the world. In an earlier discussion with
CINESCAPE, Lewis compared this group to the Center for Disease Control  substituting spirits for germs  but now that he has some episodes in the can, he has
rethought the analogy somewhat.

"Originally," says Lewis, a partner in Trilogy Entertainment, which also produces the
revamped Outer Limits, "I wanted to have a show that blended the mystical and occult
with high-tech. What I've found is that the more hardware that intrudes on this world
we're creating, the more it stretches credibility. We've found that the more we focus on
the traditional forms of paranormal experiences  the room shaking, people feeling a
spiritual presence viscerally  the more understandable and accessible it is to people. If
you sit there and say, '0kay, what we've got is a spectral entity, let's run the
information through the computer,' it takes you to nowhere land."

Still, Lewis wants his fantasy series to be rooted in reality, something he accomplishes
by playing with the notion that famous real-life authors and scientists such as Robert
Louis Stevenson, Edgar Alien Poe and Albert Einstein were members of the Legacy.
"That puts a spin on history for us," he enthuses. "It says, 'You didn't know this, but
while Stevenson was writing Kidnapped, he was also writing a really scary short story
about seeing a ghost. And why did he write that? Because he was part of this society
and was experiencing such things.' Obviously I'm making this up, but it's the kind of
thing that could be true. The more I'm grounding the show in historical, literate
material, the more comfortable and acceptable it is."

Emphasizing the point, he turns to two of the first season's scripts. The first is "The
Twelfth Cave," which posits that beyond the 11 known caves that contained the Dead
Sea Scrolls, there is another cave in which a scroll has just been found and kept secret.
"It has tremendous power," Lewis says. "And a former member of the Legacy
[portrayed by David Ogden Stiers] has gone bad, gotten ahold of it and comes to the
Legacy because he needs their fancy equipment to decipher it. He lies to them, saying
that the scroll was given to him, but actually he stole it, killing someone to get it,"
Lewis explains. "The fantasy element works in part because we're working from a
known historical item like the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Similarly, "Doppleganger" deals with the transfer of the remains of a mummy and
various artifacts buried with it from a museum in Cairo to one in the United States.
"It's an incredibly rare opportunity [for the Legacy] because they've never been able to
identify this particular mummy," says Lewis. "The way mummies work is that they are
wrapped so that their souls cannot enter their body and take it to heaven. The Kai is
their spirit, and this spirit is wandering around somewhere, desperate to get into a
body. When the Legacy gets the mummy shipped to them, all kinds of hell breaks
loose. Then the question is, 'Did someone do this on purpose? Is there a malevolent
force that wants to destroy the Legacy for some reason?"

What the Legacy ultimately discovers is that this spirit was once the daughter of a
Pharaoh who died by accident and whose death was covered up. Now that spirit wants
to enter the body of 8-year-old Katherine Corrigan (Alexandra Purvis), the daughter of
Legacy member Rachel Corrigan (Helen Shaver), to live the life she had been denied.
Discovering all of this takes a toll on Legacy leader, or precept, Dr. Derek Rayne
(Derek de Lint), whose "visions" became overwhelming.

"This spirit visits Katherine and tries to kill her and then join with her body. It's really
frightening," Lewis says. "Our characters are truly at risk and it seems almost
believable, at least in terms of the ancient Egyptian belief systems we're dealing with in
the episode. Once again, using those things that exist in history and that support
known paranormal phenomena works for us. It's when we sort of get off and just make
up our own stuff that the stories start to get pretty fragile."

Coming up with stories for a show like this is hard work," Lewis says. "Not that
something like ER is easy. But in something that is a contemporary drama in a hospital
where people come in with their heads lopped off, body parts missing and all the
trauma that ensues, you have a somewhat natural direction to travel. There's really
something funny about homo sapiens  they are the only animals that run to the
epicenter of a disaster. We have this innate curiosity about human tragedy. The deer
and other animals just want to run the other way; they don't want to see what
happened to Bambis mother. But we do! So there is a specific challenge in all this
paranormal material because they're tales that have to be grounded in human
experience, they have to involve your characters in a real way and be treated
seriously."

Shrugging off comparisons with that other reality-based paranormal show, The X-
Files, Lewis offers: "I don't think anyone on television has tackled this genre in this
way. American Gothic's in the same region, but that's a pretty malignant, evil take on
the subject. I guess I'm a Jeffersonian. I believe that people are basically good and
there are a few bad apples. Not that we sugarcoat everything. All the regulars have
their Achilles' heel, which is really what makes this show work."

"If you were to go back to the original movie Poltergeist, you'd see that it dealt with a
family that moved into a home built over sacred ground," he continues. "Suddenly
they've got a problem and poltergeists went after the Achilles' heel of each of those
people. The tone of the series pays homage to that film. Each character in the Legacy
has some cross to bear that they're constantly being confronted with. That tests each
character. We're dealing with peoples' foibles and the idea of evil spirits, which are a
metaphor for our own personal demons. How do these spirits destroy someone? They
find your weaknesses and exploit them. That's pretty relatable. We've all done things
that we regret doing and oftentimes we can be brought to our knees by them. Gary
Hart was. Looks like Bill Clinton is about to be. We all feast on that, on stories like
that, because we understand them. At the same time, we want to tell good stories that
have endings that make you feel good about humanity. Evil does not win on this show.
Good will be victorious, though there will often be sacrifices in the struggle."

Returning to the X-Files comparison, one which every spooks-oriented series must
face, Lewis praises the Fox shows quality but says that, as a storyteller, he's not
interested in its notions of government conspiracies or its "dry, slow-paced" style of
exposition.

"The X-Files says that the government is hiding all kinds of things from the American
people," he says. "We're not positing that anyone is hiding anything, just that there are
things that are not understood. There are cracks in the world  or in our existence 
and there is something in there. Evil is there. Evil is present, and in many ways it is
trying to take hold of our life, our world and our society, and this group has been
fighting it for thousands of years. There are moments when the police will contact the
Legacy and say, 'We don't know what to do. Will you help us? This can't get out
because people will flip.' It's just our own take on the material, and it's as unique as the
world postulated on The X-Files. When you enter the world of Poltergeist, you have to believe."